What Robinson tells of Coleridge is especially noticeable.
"I used," he says, "to compare him as a disputant to a serpent,--easy
to kill if you assume the offensive; but if you attack him, his bite is
mortal. Some time after writing this, when I saw Madame De Stael, in
London, I asked her what she thought of him. She replied, 'He is very
great in monologue, but he has no idea of dialogue.'"
Perhaps not. Yet with his equal, he would not have been found wanting
in this respect. Less English than German in genius, he would have
been on terms of equality with thinkers of all times. But for his
introduction of German ideas into English literature, we had waited
a generation or more. He comprehended and interpreted the ideas and
methods of its great thinkers. Better than most, he fulfilled Plato's
canon, that "only the gods discriminate and define." I find him the
most stimulating of modern British thinkers. He had wider sympathies
with pure thought, and cast more piercing glances into its essence and
laws than any contemporary.
I must repeat my sense of obligation to him for the quickening
influence which the perusal of his pages always awakens, at every
paragraph making me his debtor for a thought, an image, which it
were worth while to have lived for, so stimulating is his phrase to
imagination and reason alike; scarcely less to understanding and
memory. If his mysticism tinge his speculations with its shifting
hues, and one threads the labyrinth into which he conducts with wonder
and amazement, he yet surrenders unreservedly to his guide, sure of
coming to the light, with memorable experiences to reward him for the
adventure.
His appreciation of the Greek, as of the Teutonic genius, is the more
remarkable when we consider how rarely his countrymen have comprehended
foreign ideas; and that Shakespeare even found in him his first
interpreter.
In his Literary Remains, we find these remarkable notes on the Greek
drama:--
"It is truly singular that Plato--whose philosophy and religion were
both exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all
things, genuine prophet and anticipator of the protestant era--should
have given in his dialogue of the Banquet a justification of our
Shakespeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either
dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with Aristophanes
and Agathon, remained awake; and that, while he continued to drink
with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most
reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same
genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry; or, that the tragic poet
ought, at the same time, to contain within himself the powers of
comedy. Now, as this was certainly repugnant to the entire theory
of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is
evident that Plato must have fixed the eye of his contemplation on the
innermost essentials of the drama, abstracted from conditions of age
and country. In another passage he even adds the reason, namely: that
opposites illustrate each other's nature, and in their struggle draw
forth the strength of the combatants, and display the conquered as
sovereign even in the territories of the rival power."
Again: "The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the
spiritual part of our nature a more decided preponderance over animal
cravings and impulses than is met with in real life; the comic poet
idealizes his characters by making the animal the governing power,
and the intellectual the mere instrument. But as tragedy is not a
collection of virtues and perfections, but takes care only that the
vices and imperfections shall spring from the passions, errors, and
prejudices which arise of the soul; so neither is comedy a mere crowd
of vices and follies, but whatever qualities it represents, even though
they are in a certain sense amiable, it still displays them as having
their origin in some dependence on our lower nature, accompanied with a
defect in true freedom of spirit and self-subsistence, and subject to
that unconnection by contradiction of inward being, to which all folly
is owing."
Coleridge, while writing this masterly analysis of the seats of the
tragic and comic in man's inner being, and with the text of Plato and
of Shakespeare before him, must have been contemplating the springs of
his own defects, the strength twinned with his weaknesses, which ever
made him the helpless demigod he was; aspiring ever, yet drawn downward
by the leash of his frailties, as tragic a character as any that
Shakespeare himself has drawn.